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I never volunteered to be the sun, but they all said I gave off the most heat. With your reddish temper and your fire-blonde hair, you’re a natural at it, they said. Someone else had already volunteered to be wind in any case, and another was the rain, and the moon was a diaphanous goddess of a girl named Moira, so I became the sun by default...

When she could no longer hide her morning sickness from her co-workers at the Rite Aid, she confessed her dilemma to Myrna, the closest to her in age. Myrna, instead of offering the expected words of comfort, told her a story about a woman who had an abortion and, for months afterwards, woke in the middle of the night to the sound of babies crying. “She thought it was her dreams,” Myrna said. “Then she thought she was hallucinating, but later she found out it was the fox killing the wild rabbits outside. When they die rabbits make a sound like babies crying. So she couldn’t stop having these dreams about her abortion that were really the rabbits dying.” She had turned her thin, hawkish face towards Lisette’s and flashed an unkind grin with her sallow teeth. Lisette, out of breath, had mumbled, “creepy,” and rushed to help a customer in the shampoo aisle. After that she lay awake at night listening, but there were no rabbits dying in her backyard. She couldn’t tell if what she felt was relief.